Google is celebrating the 126th birthday of physicist Erwin Schrödinger with a homepage doodle that channels his well-known thought experiment, dubbed "Schrödinger's cat."

The doodle turns the Google logo into a mathematical equation, with that famous cat in the center. Depending on how you look at it, the animal could be either dead or alive, a nod to the thought experiment.

As this video explains, the "Schrödinger's cat" experiment places a cat in a box with a vial of radioactive acid. If even the smallest bit of that substance leaks, or decays, a hammer will break the vial and the cat will die.

"The observer cannot know whether or not an atom of the substance has decayed, and consequently, cannot know whether the vial has been broken, the hydrocyanic acid released, and the cat killed," one explanation holds. "Since we cannot know, according to quantum law, the cat is both dead and alive, in what is called a superposition of states."

Schrödinger, however, is also well known for his wave equation. "It came as a result of his dissatisfaction with the quantum condition in Bohr's orbit theory and his belief that atomic spectra should really be determined by some kind of eigenvalue problem," according to the Nobel Prize organization, which awarded him and Paul A.M. Dirac the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.

As the Nobel organization noted, Schrödinger was quite the renaissance man, dabbling in painting, botany, grammar, and German poetry over the years before settling into his scientific work. He left Germany after Hitler's rise to power, teaching at Oxford in England, the University of Graz of Austria, the University of Ghent in Belgium, and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin, where he stayed until his retirement in 1955. He then returned to Vienna, where he died in 1961.

Chloe Albanesius has been with PCMag.com since April 2007, most recently as Executive Editor for News and Features. Prior to that, she worked for a year covering financial IT on Wall Street for Incisive Media. From 2002 to 2005, Chloe covered technology policy for The National Journal's Technology Daily in Washington, DC. She has held internships at NBC's Meet the Press, washingtonpost.com, the Tate Gallery press office in London, Roll Call, and Congressional Quarterly. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in journalism from American University...
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